Review

A review is someone's evaluation of something. We support reviews and ratings for a wide
range of schema.org types, including businesses, products, and different creative works such
as books or movies.

Google displays the following types of reviews in search results:

Critic review: A snippet from a longer
review article that a single editor has created, curated, or compiled for a publisher.

Review snippets: A rich result (previously
known as a rich snippet) of a review or rating markup from a review website, usually an
average of the combined rating scores from reviewers. Review snippets appear in Google
Search results either under the search result or in the Google Knowledge Cards.

Critic review

With your critic reviews displayed prominently in Google Search results, your readers will be
able to easily find them and navigate to your website to read the complete reviews. Critic
reviews appear in Search results with a snippet from the critic, the critic's name and the
publisher icon. You can supply critic reviews for the following content types:

Local businesses

Movies

Books

Critic review examples

Business reviews

Embedded review

You can embed critic reviews inside your business listings. This is useful for sites that
provide booking services for many businesses or for business listing aggregators.

Standalone reviews

You can provide standalone review blocks, which is suitable markup for sites that
perform no direct function for the business being reviewed, such as news sites.

Profanity and vulgar language are discouraged. Reviews should be
appropriate for a broad and diverse audience. Consequently, reviews containing vulgar or
profane language may be ineligible for use.

Refer clearly to a specific product or service. Do this by nesting the
review or ratings within the markup of another schema.org type—such as
schema.org/Book or schema.org/LocalBusiness
—or by using that schema.org typed element as a value for the itemReviewed property.

Make sure the reviews and ratings you mark up are readily available to users from
the marked-up page. It should be immediately obvious to users that the
page has review or ratings content.

Provide review and/or rating information about a specific item, not about a
category or a list of items. For example, “hotels in Madrid,” “summer dresses,”
or “cake recipes” are not specific items. See also our
structured
data guidelines for multiple entities on the same page.

No reviews are shown for adult-related products or services.

Single reviewer name needs to be valid. For example, "50% off until Saturday"
is not a valid name for a reviewer.

Ratings that don't use a 5-point scale:
By default, Google assumes that your site uses a 5-point scale, where 5 is the
best possible rating and 1 is the worst, but you can use any other scale. If
you do, you can mark up the best and worst ratings, and Google will scale that
to the 5-star system used in rich snippets.

Local businesses

The following guidelines apply to critic reviews of local businesses:

Snippets must not be written or provided by the business or content provider unless they
are genuine, independent, and unpaid editorial reviews.

Critic reviews must allow for customers to express both positive and negative sentiments.
They may not be vetted by the business or restricted by the content provider based on the
positive/negative sentiment of the review before submission to Google.

Critic reviews cannot be template sentences built from data or automated metrics. For
example, the following is not acceptable: "Based on X number of responses, on average
people experienced X with this business."

Critic reviews for multiple-location businesses such as retail chains or franchises can
only be submitted for the specific business location for which they were written. In other
words, critic reviews for multiple-location businesses cannot be syndicated or applied to
all business locations of the same company.

There can't be any commercial agreements (paid or otherwise) to provide critic reviews
between the content provider and the reviewed business.

Do not include critic reviews that are duplicate or similar across many businesses.

Only include critic reviews that have been directly produced by your site, not reviews
from third-party sites or syndicated reviews.

Movies and Books

The following guidelines apply to critic reviews of movies and books:

The snippet must be an exact excerpt from the long-form body of the review. It should not
be the review headline, a question or a teaser.

The snippet must clearly indicate an opinion about the review subject. It should not be
factual (e.g. "Gravity" is a film by Alfonso Cuarón) or a plot synopsis (e.g. Dr. Ryan
Stone is an engineer on her first space mission).

The snippet must make sense on its own and should not be confusing to someone who isn't
reading the whole article.

The snippet must be complete (not cut off, truncated, or ending in elllipses) and
well-formed (having correct punctuation and grammar) thought.

Critic review properties

The following properties should be populated for all reviews, regardless of the review subject.

You must include the required properties for your content to be eligible for display as a rich result.
You can also include the recommended properties to add more information about your content,
which could provide a better user experience.

Snippet from the body of the actual review that captures the author's opinion about the
review subject. This snippet will be used on the Google Search result page, as shown
in the mocks above. All of the following criteria should be met, else the review will be
excluded from the feature.

The snippet cannot exceed 200 characters.

Use non-smart double quotation marks (") to denote titles, e.g. ""Gravity"
is the best movie."

Name of the author of the review. Provide the full name of the author. The value should
be capitalized correctly. Names comprised of entirely uppercase or lowercase letters will
be edited such that the first letter of every word is capitalized.

If no value is provided, Google assumes that the crawled page is the location of the
review in its entirety.

If your structured data is on a page other than the one containing the full text of
the review, or if you have multiple URLs for the full-text review, you must populate
this field.

The webpage indicated by this field must contain a full-length review that is longer
than 300 words.

If you have duplicate pages for the same content, make sure you use the
canonical URL.

Review subject properties

In addition to the critic review properties, you must define
the specific properties for the review type that you want to implement.

You must include the required properties for your structured data to display in search results.
You can also include the recommended properties to add more information to your structured data,
which could provide a better user experience.

URL to a page that unambiguously identifies the book. URLs to the Google Play Books
page, Wikipedia page, or official website are strongly preferred. The
sameAs property isn't required if you define isbn.

Review snippet

When Google finds valid reviews or ratings markup, we may show a rich snippet that includes
stars and other summary info from reviews or ratings. In addition to the text of the review,
a rating is an evaluation described on a numeric scale (such as 1 to 5). You can supply
ratings for the following content types:

Local businesses

Movies

Books

Music

Products

Review snippet examples

Here's an example of a simple review.

JSON-LD

Here's an example of a simple review in JSON-LD using the Structured Data
Testing Tool:

RDFa

Here's an example of a simple review in RDFa using the Structured Data
Testing Tool:

Microdata

Here's an example of a simple review in Microdata using the Structured Data
Testing Tool:

You can embed a review into another schema.org type using its
review property.

JSON-LD

Here's an example of a embedded review in JSON-LD using the Structured Data
Testing Tool:

RDFa

Here's an example of a embedded review in RDFa using the Structured Data
Testing Tool:

Microdata

Here's an example of a embedded review in Microdata using the Structured Data
Testing Tool:

You can add ratings to your reviews.

JSON-LD

Here's an example of a review with ratings in JSON-LD using the Structured Data
Testing Tool:

RDFa

Here's an example of a review with ratings in RDFa using the Structured Data
Testing Tool:

Microdata

Here's an example of a review with ratings in Microdata using the Structured Data
Testing Tool:

You can omit the rating for an individual review if your marked-up content contains both an
author and a review date. For aggregate reviews, you must supply the average rating for the
rich snippet to display.

JSON-LD

Here's an example of an aggregate rating in JSON-LD using the Structured Data
Testing Tool:

RDFa

Here's an example of an aggregate rating in RDFa using the Structured Data
Testing Tool:

Microdata

Here's an example of an aggregate rating in Microdata using the Structured Data
Testing Tool:

Review snippet guidelines

To be eligible for review snippet, be aware of the following general guidelines:

Aggregate ratings: An aggregate evaluation of an item by many people
should be marked up as a
schema.org/AggregateRating. Google may
display aggregate ratings as rich snippets or, for certain types of items, answers in
search results.

Refer clearly to a specific product or service. Do this by nesting the
review or ratings within the markup of another schema.org type—such as
schema.org/Book or schema.org/LocalBusiness
—or by using that schema.org typed element as a value for the itemReviewed property.

Make sure the reviews and ratings you mark up are readily available to users from
the marked-up page. It should be immediately obvious to users that the
page has review or ratings content.

Provide review and/or rating information about a specific item, not about a
category or a list of items. For example, “hotels in Madrid,” “summer dresses,”
or “cake recipes” are not specific items. See also our
structured
data guidelines for multiple entities on the same page.

No reviews are shown for adult-related products or services.

Single reviewer name needs to be valid. For example, "50% off until Saturday"
is not a valid name for a reviewer.

Ratings that don't use a 5-point scale:
By default, Google assumes that your site uses a 5-point scale, where 5 is the
best possible rating and 1 is the worst, but you can use any other scale. If
you do, you can mark up the best and worst ratings, and Google will scale that
to the 5-star system used in rich snippets.

Local Businesses

Google may display information from aggregate ratings markup in the Google Knowledge Cards.
The following guidelines apply to review snippets in knowledge cards for local businesses:

Ratings must be sourced directly from users.

Don't rely on human editors to create, curate or compile ratings information for local
businesses. These types of reviews are critic reviews.

Sites must collect ratings information directly from users and not from other sites.

Review snippet definitions

You must include the required properties for your structured data to display in search results.
You can also include the recommended properties to add more information to your structured data,
which could provide a better user experience.

Common review properties

The item that is being reviewed. This needs to be a valid schema.org type. However, if
the review is embedded into another schema.org type using the
review property,
the itemReviewed property can be omitted.

The item that is being rated. This needs to be a valid schema.org type. However, if the
aggregate rating is embedded into another schema.org type, using
aggregateRating property, then there is no
need to mark up the itemReviewed property.